[beat]

Honestly? That's not how development works at all, in my experience. Best developers aren't isolated on "most interesting problems", but rather, are getting constantly sucked into war rooms and emergency calls. And when they are working on "interesting problems", they are constantly working, verbally and in writing, to convince reluctant management and other engineers to agree to their new, "interesting" approach to the problem in question. Those are massively social behaviors. "Being honest" is necessary but not sufficient. Understanding people's motivations, finding reasons for them to believe your idea is beneficial for them and their own interests, that's what gets you what you want.

Here's an example. I am trying to do important, interesting work, but I'm often interrupted, because I work in DevOps and wind up drawn into other people's problems. So on the whiteboard next to my desk, I wrote my two "Wildly Important Goals" (from the book Four Disciplines of Execution), and underneath that, the sentence "If something does not apply to these goals, why am I doing it?" This became quite the controversy, but it works! It has significantly reduced my interruptions. That's social skill in action.